The One Thing Every Personal Brand Needs for Career Success

A unique and distinctive personal brand is a big part of creating positive personal impact and your life and career success. However, there is one thing that I believe that should be a part of everyone’s personal brand – integrity.

Tweet 62 in my latest career success book Success Tweetssays it well. “Your personal brand should be uniquely you, but built on integrity. Integrity is doing the right thing when no one is looking.”

I get a daily meditation from my friends at The Walk the Talk Company. You can get one too by going to their website (www.walkthetalk.com) and signing up.

Several months ago, their meditation was this quote from Oprah Winfrey. “Real integrity is doing the right thing, knowing that nobody’s going to know whether you did it or not.” This is true, man is it true. If you practice situational ethics – doing the right thing only when you’re in the public eye — you aren’t really a person of high integrity, you’re just pretending to be one. And in my experience this will catch up with you and hamper your drive toward the life and career success you want and deserve.

Besides, it’s hard to act one way in public, and another in private. So to be safe, resolve to act like Oprah. Do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do – not because you’ll get credit, or avoid getting into trouble. This approach to life will put you on the road to career success.

John Maxwell is a well known business author. One of his books sends the same message. It’s called There’s No Such Thing As Business Ethics: There’s Only One Rule for Making Decisions. According to John, that rule is the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” In other words, do the right thing. Always act with integrity.

There’s a practical side to this too. Mark Twain once said, “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.” In other words, if you’re a person of high integrity there are no complicating factors – like remembering what you did or said in a given situation.

Polonius gave similar advice to Hamlet. “To thine own self be true, and it must follow as the day the night, thou canst be false to no man.”

Roy Blackman, my father in law passed away a few years ago. This quote was his epitaph. It was on the program handed out at his funeral. Roy embodied it in how he lived his life. It was the only piece of advice he gave his grandson, Matt, as he went off to college.

Oprah, John Maxwell, Mark Twain and Shakespeare — and me to, for that matter — are all in agreement on one common sense career success point. If you want to become known as a person of high integrity – and I believe integrity is the cornerstone of any personal brand – act as a person of high integrity all the time – not just when it suits you, or when someone might notice.

The common sense career success coach point here is simple. Creating positive personal impact is a necessarycompetency you must develop if you want to creat the life and career success you deserve. The first step in creating positive personal impact is developing and nurturing your unique personal brand. Your personal brand should be built on integrity. This is embodied in the career advice in Tweet 62 in Success Tweets. “Your personal brand should be uniquely you, but built on integrity. Integrity is doing the right thing when no one is looking.” Act with integrity and you will become known as a person who can be trusted. Being trusted will help you create the life and career success you want and deserve.

That’s my career advice on the importance of building your personal brand on integrity. What do you think? Please take a minute to share your thoughts with us by leaving a comment. As always, thanks for reading my career advice. Thanks even more for your comments. They help me make this career success blog the absolute best it can be.